


Green

by proprioception (sacrificethemtothesquid)



Series: Shrapnel [3]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 05:04:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11395902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sacrificethemtothesquid/pseuds/proprioception
Summary: There was a phrase for it once: coming in from the cold.If Val cannot be the one who brings Furiosa in, she’s grateful that Max can.





	Green

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bookwyrm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookwyrm/gifts).



 

Valkyrie pushes back her hair, getting a decent amount of black grease on her forehead in the process.

“You’ve got, mm,” Max says, gesturing.

She laughs and tries to wipe it away, but only ends up smearing it further. “It’s been a long time since I could get good and greasy.”

His eyes go a little big, and he ducks away, muttering.

She _likes_ this man of Furiosa’s. Out on the Salt, she’d felt attacked, torched by a blistering envy that a man who stayed away, a man who barely _spoke_ , a man with death in his eyes and blood in his hair could turn her sister around with only a short handful of words. Furiosa had only just come back, and Val wanted to greedily lap up her presence, to touch her face and hair to confirm she was back, that she was real.

When Val got to the Citadel, she’d seen that he was really a mirror to Furiosa, a reflection, a chirality. The two of them are fluent in a language Val is grateful to have never had to learn.

She likes watching them together. There’s a poetry in their interactions, spare and intense. They are two ends of an electric lead, the connection arcing across the distance. She almost never sees Max touch her, never sees Furiosa brush against him with the casual contact of established lovers. Together, they’re a piston and its cylinder, the parts working in perfect sync but kept separate by a thin layer of grease.

It’s so different from the Furiosa she knew. She remembers holding on to Furiosa on their bike, of leaning with her as they cornered and feeling like they were two hearts beating in the same body. Furiosa was so alive then, bright teeth in a wild grin and ash-blond hair forever escaping its thick plait. She was tall and bold and a magnet for mischief.

Furiosa is still alive. She is distilled, concentrated. She moves with the controlled grace of a dancer, her eyes flickering and alert. Val has a new bedmate now, one that keeps her well-satisfied, but when she looks at Furi, there’s that old ache, the same as it ever was. She can’t help but wonder what it would be like to spread her out, to run her hands along hard. wiry muscles that have lost the clumsy coltishness of youth.

She wonders what it would be like to share her with Max, the two halves of Furiosa’s life curled around her, loving her. The few times she’s hugged Furiosa, her sister has reacted like a feral animal, terrified of abuse but also starving for compassionate touch.

She wonders what it would be like perhaps more than she should.

 

****

 

She asks once, when she and Furi are sitting up on the green terraces, the remains of lunch between them. “You and Max,” Val says. “Will there be children?” It’s her second visit back from the Riders camp, sixteen months since she’d first ridden to the Citadel. Their mothers had often waxed poetic about the memory of easy and effective birth control, but that was Before. If Max and Furiosa have been intimate as long as she thinks they have, there should have been a baby by now.

The shadow that flickers across Furiosa’s face tells Val all she needs to know. Whatever it is, it’s definitely not the deep heartache of a woman aching to conceive. “Mari said it was all of us,” Furiosa offers instead, a shiver her voice from swallowing back the memory she’s not sharing.

“So it seems.” The women of their generation have borne the curse of the Green Place. She and Tamar and Tremble all tried, any man who was willing, any way they could. It wasn’t always pleasant, but the need to keep their clan spurred them on. Tremble held a pregnancy three months once, the longest of any of them, and then she died from a raider’s spear. Val has never cared for men herself, and has long made her peace with nature. Tamar is still quietly hoping.

“He had a child once,” Furiosa volunteers, with an expression that indicates she’s surprised to hear herself speak. It’s an expression Val is coming to know well. _How much silence have you borne_ , _my love?_ Furiosa glances at Val, then away. “It’s not something he talks about.”

She doesn’t need to ask. Max is a family man, an old phrase that meant something once. She doesn't know how she knows, but she does; perhaps it's in his devotion to his car, or the way he keeps Furiosa in his field of vision as if he's terrified at any moment she'll disappear. If he had a child, there is only one reason the child isn’t with him.

There is only one reason the child’s mother isn’t with him, either. Val doesn’t know him well - she doesn’t know him at all, really - but she’s completely certain of this. She sees it in the way he orbits around Furiosa, the way they’re tethered together like two stones on a bolas.

Furiosa is staring out into the desert, her face a study in tension and hard lines. There’s so much _regret_ in her, so much more than Val would ever think a body could hold. It never leaves. She’d thought maybe time would help ease it, but it’s woven into Furiosa warp and weft, felted so deeply Val’s coming to understand it will never be fully untangled.

Wilgee, half of the Rock Riders’ clan leadership, is brash and frank, and has made sure Val understands exactly what Furiosa was before, how she was a brutal Imperator who broke a deal and viciously killed a dozen Riders in the process. The women of the Citadel tell a different story, of a taciturn, self-sacrificing warrior who is changing the world while trying not to exist in it herself. Val suspects the truth is somewhere in the middle.

There was a phrase for it once: coming in from the cold.

If Val cannot be the one who brings Furiosa in, she’s grateful that Max can.

 

****

 

She doesn’t know Max. Not really. Not at all. She knows what Cheedo whispered that first night at the Citadel - “They’re _together_ ” - like it was a delicious scandal.

It’s neither scandalous nor particularly delicious, not as visibly damaged the both of them are. Both Furiosa and Val have taken other lovers, it seems, but still Val is inexplicably drawn to her. “Easy, girl,” Amy cautions. “That’s a heartbreak waiting to happen.”

“You and her,” Nyree said, not long after they'd left the Citadel. Her tone is soft and vulnerable, but her words are as forthright as ever. “I’d step aside, if you asked.”

“I’m not asking,” Val assures her. That path is washed away, the tracks swallowed up by a yawning chasm.

It doesn’t stop her from standing on the edge though, staring across at the side she will never reach.

She doesn’t, as a rule, spend her time with men. They don’t ignite her the way they ignite Tamar, and she’s found the company of women suits her just fine. Still, she watches Max in the garage, his stocky frame bent into his engine, and considers. She goes back to the image in her head of Furiosa between them, turning it over and over like a weatherworn stone. It’s a strange fantasy, to want something like that, something that’s not for herself.

Nyree is not exclusive; that’s an understanding they came to almost immediately, and although they spend their nights together more often than they don’t, Val struggles with pain, and on the nights it’s bad, on the nights she can’t offer Nyree what she needs, the Rock Rider seeks out other partners. It’s never crossed Val’s mind to participate, to do anything other than sink into the silence of her own bedroll and breathe in the darkness, blissfully alone.

Furiosa has been alone too long. The truth of it is sunk into her skin, in the flat green of her eyes. It’s a hard kind of dehydration, the sort that isn’t easily cured by sweet water and quiet rest.

Maybe, Val thinks, between her and Max, the two of them together might be able to love Furiosa back to health.

 

****

 

The Green Place did not die all at once, but Valkyrie remembers the exact moment it stopped being home.

They’re coming back from a long patrol; it should have been fifteen days, but there had been raiders to skirt and a new faction to investigate, and so she and her fellow riders cross the old dyke road back into Vuvalini territory almost seventeen days late. The dense odor of anaerobic rot rises up to welcome them in, and it’s all Valkyrie can do not to rev her engine and spin her tires back into the shimmering wasteland.

Every time she crosses the dyke road without Furiosa, it’s a burning rebuke, her greatest failure, and if she could just ride into the sand and never cross the dyke again, it would be too soon.

In the camp, they’re welcomed back like the risen dead. Denny grins and grins and rings the bell that draws the others in from the swamp, and then Tamar’s throwing her arms around her aunt’s neck. “It didn’t take,” she moans. “I thought it would, I thought _this_ time-”

Maadi cups the younger woman’s head, and presses their foreheads together. “Oh, my girl. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Tremble has been gone for seven months. The prospect of a baby had energized them all, and losing them both has gutted the clan as if it were a rotted fish, fetid and soft.

“Thought we’d lost you,” Jeddah says gruffly. “You’re late.”

Val is exhausted in a way she can’t express. It goes deep into her bones, holding her down like her marrow’s been filled with sand, and her initiate mother mistakes it for simple fatigue. “Go,” Jeddah tells her firmly. “Eat and sleep. We can talk later.”

They still measure time in years, celebrate holidays with origins in the world that was Before. Val understands the origins, but she’s counted in days and months since Furiosa was taken, the day that the patrol came back without her, without Mary Jobassa, without Katie Concannon.

“New scavengers,” she says tiredly. “Ran into a group of nomads who called them Buzzards. They didn’t know what the Buzzards call themselves.”

“How far out?” Jeddah asks, eyes narrowed.

“Far enough,” says Amy, wiping the dust from her face. “But we had to make sure.”

“Could have been lost,” Jeddah repeats. “We wouldn't even know. Every time we send you out, fewer and fewer come back.”

“That’s not our choice,” Val fires back. “You think we _want-_ ”

“Hush, girl.” It’s a dismissal, firm and absolute, and not for the first time, Val feels a sick spike of resentment at her initiate mother. The strength she’d once so admired has turned into obstinance, conviction into willful ignorance. The Green Place is dying around them, the spring flowing less and less, the pools going thick with algae and rot, and Jeddah would have them stay because she cannot conceive of going anywhere else. Her man is buried here, her children, and she still can’t see the death that is slowly bubbling into the soil.

Later, Val can’t sleep. She bundles up in her thickest blanket and heads to the top of the dyke to sit with her rifle between her knees, her slingshot tucked into the front of her shirt. The dyke is a natural birm rising above the rest of the land, and from it she can see across the Green Place, across the endless dunes beyond. There are fewer trees these days, the tallest ones losing their leafy crowns in red, crunchy handfuls. Crows swarm where they didn’t before, glossy and black and deafening.

It hurts to watch this, to watch the paradise of her childhood wither. She doesn’t know if she just didn’t notice it until Furiosa was gone, but it feels like when the raiders took Furiosa, they took everything that was green and good along with her.

She hears Mari approach. “Keeping watch, eh,” her aunt says. “Mind if I join?”

Val shakes her head.

“See anything?” Mari asks. “My eyes aren’t what they once were.”

“Seeing it all die,” Val mutters, and it comes out more bitter that she means. There’s poison in her heart and she tries to keep it hidden, but tonight she can’t swallow it back.

She expects a rebuke, but none comes. “I know,” Mari says quietly. She sighs heavily. “Crops are failing this year. Too much salt in the water.”

It should be a surprise, but it isn’t, just another blow in a place that’s already bruised.

“I think we have to leave,” Mari admits. “We can’t stay here.”

Val’s first instinct is to deny it, despite the fact she knows, she _knows_. It hurts to hear it, hurts to face it, because leaving the Green Place means leaving behind the one place that Furiosa might return to.

Val can’t give up on Furi. She _can’t._ It’s been almost two thousand days, and every single one feels like a deep, thin slice.

Mari has the ability to see into people as easily as if their insides are spread out in front of her. “We keep moving,” she murmurs. “You know that, pet.”

“Yes.” Suddenly, her eyes are burning, and she hugs her knees up to her chin. She is twenty-one years old, and she wants nothing more than to leave this diseased, dying place and fly across the sand to find Furiosa and Mary Jobassa, even though all sense and logic insists they’re as dead as the Green Place itself.

“Jeddah won’t agree to that,” Val blurts out. “She’d have us stay and hunt the crows until we turn into crows ourselves. If we can’t fish from the pools, she’d have us fish from the sky.”

Mari purses her lips. “She’s got her reasons, that one.” At Val’s disparaging snort, she raises a hand. “For the record, I agree with you, and I’m not the only one.”

“Who would go with us?” There are rifts among the clans, lines drawn from pain and hardship.

“Amy,” Mari says immediately, but that’s a foregone conclusion, because wherever Mari goes, Amy will go, and Maadi will follow Amy, with Tamar tagging behind.

Jobassa was a masterful leader, a seamstress with words, and Furiosa’s easy smile would win over those her mother could not. Katie would state the blunt, inescapable truth, and the tribe would go, grieving but united. In their absence, those that follow Jeddah have grown more entrenched, while the rest sadly examine yellowing leaves and look to the horizon for hope.

“Lina will go too,” Mari adds, and Val blinks in surprise. It’s wholly unexpected that Lina would choose not to side with her sister; even though she and Jeddah have never been particularly close, they try to present a cooperative front.

Val breathes out slowly. “You’ve been thinking about this awhile.”

“We stopped having babies.” Mari suddenly looks so old, the sadness of survival painfully etched into her body. “We keep _losing…_ ” Her voice trails off, but Val hears what she cannot say.

 _We keep losing those we love_.

Val looks out over the Green Place, and all at once the urge to run is an overwhelming force. She smells the fetid stench of the pools, shrunk and salty. She used to swim there once, with Furiosa at her side, but Furiosa is gone, and the Green Place is becoming brown. A crow dives from the sky, and in one smooth, resentful movement Val loads a stone in her slingshot and shoots it down, the feathery body hitting the sand with a hollow thump. “We keep moving,” she mutters.

They hold out for a week, and then they wake up one morning to find the carefully tended corn collapsed in the mud. “We can’t stay any longer,” Mari announces calmly, and Jeddah explodes.  

In the end, they go, a small band of them with what meager supplies they have strapped to their bikes. Val wears crow’s wings on her shoulders, a final fuck-you to the place she's leaving behind.

When she crosses the dyke for the last time, she doesn’t look back.

 

****

 

In the end, it’s _Max_ who brings it up. They’re in the garage, Max elbow-deep in his engine, Val adjusting the fuel line of her motorcycle. She doesn’t need to be so near his vehicle, but she chooses to be, partly because she likes Max, likes the dry humor that lingers beneath his wariness, and partly because Max is a component of Furiosa, and that makes him something Val wants to know.

“If you want something, you gotta bring it up,” he says, apropos to nothing. His voice is pitched low enough that she almost misses it.

Val’s got a double handful of dripping guzzoline and she grabs for a pan, distracted. “Mm?”

“Dunno what she’d think,” he goes on. “But whatever _you’re_ thinking, you gotta _say_.”

So the scav sees. As the leaking fuel pings in the metal dish, Val is mildly chagrined, but mostly just damn impressed. It speaks well of him that he’d notice and say something to her so directly, without rebuke or judgement. “There was a time I might have pursued the notion,” she says quietly.

He raises an eyebrow, unsurprised. “World’s dead,” he says. “Not you. Not her.”

“I have no claim on her,” Val counters.

He shrugs. “She claims herself.”

“And you?”

He shuffles, looks away, twitches. Ah. “She goes where she wants,” he says finally. “We ride together, for now.”

The bond between Furiosa and Max is a tangible force. It’s one thing for Val to consider it from a distance, as an outsider, but the concrete possibility of inserting herself feels like a missing sparkplug, a jarringly absent beat where one is expected.

“For now,” Val echoes. “Do you plan to stay?”

He can’t look at her, and that says everything. He doesn’t plan. He can’t; it’s not in his nature. He’d been half-feral when she’d first seen him in the War Rig, and the taint of that wildness lingers in his bones. Furiosa may very well be the only thread tying him to civilization. Val knows they’ve gone together into the Waste, on scouting missions and supply runs.

He doesn’t say and Furiosa hasn’t said, but the girls have firm political control over this region. If Max goes, Furiosa will go with him, and if he doesn’t come back, neither will she.   

Val _wants_ , but not if she comes between them. She will not be that firewall.  

“You n’ her,” Max says. “She hasn’t said, but, mm.”

“We were young,” Val says, the words catching in her throat. “It was a long time ago.” She can’t say that for thousands of days she missed Furiosa, that she felt her absence like her lungs had been torn from her chest. She can’t say that seeing her cross the sand was like standing in the heart of a star, blazing and perfect.

“Doesn’t mean it’s not, mm…” he rolls the thought around his mouth before finally settling on, “Things linger.”

She thinks of the ruined Green Place, of how she went into the wastes with only half of her mothers. She thinks of Nyree, of her warm, uncomplicated embrace. The Citadel is green, and Furiosa is alive, but it’s not the Green Place, and they are not the girls they once were.

“What would _you_ say?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “Not for me to say.”

That’s a lie, and if he doesn’t see it, he doesn’t see Furiosa at all, and Val knows better. Furiosa trusts him. He turned her around out on the sand, and if he says anything at all, she would follow him almost without question. “There doesn’t have to be a choice,” Val says quietly.

He blinks, startled, and she feels an inner thrill of having surprised him. An entire range of emotions cross his face, crumpling his features as he processes her meaning. “You’d…” He trails off, frowning. “And then…?”

“For her,” Val says.

He isn’t good at sharing, but she already knows that. Surviving the wastes has trained him to be selfish, to protect the things he values most. To his credit, he actually considers it.

“Don’t know,” he finally says. His eyes roll to the ceiling with obvious discomfort. “Can’t say...but, mm.”

She waits.

“Sleep,” he finally says. “It’s, mm.”

“I understand.” And she does. After the Bullet Farm, when Furiosa had been half out of her mind with fever, Val had watched the nightmares bubble up.

“Might be a dealbreaker,” Max says.

This suddenly feels like she’s proposed something terrible, like she’s intruding in a place she has no business being. This is something she wants, but she’s pushing herself into a space that isn’t for her.

She wants so badly to connect, to re-establish something she was so sure she’d lost. The Green Place is gone, poisoned and dead, but Furiosa is here, and she’s _alive,_ and Val has been seduced by the past.

_We keep moving._

She’s been fascinated by Furiosa and Max’s relationship, and with a twist in her gut she realizes more than a little jealous. She’s spent so many years wandering the desert, homeless and adrift with the few mothers that came with her, and at the first breath of something familiar, she’s ready to throw herself in completely.

Furiosa is not a pool. She is not the waters of the Green Place, deep and sweet and cool. She is a person, one who has seen more than anyone should, one who’s committed grave sins in her quest to survive. She is not something for Val to reclaim.

The road is washed away, and no matter how she wants to, Val cannot build this bridge.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly, her hands poised over the pan of guzzoline. She flicks the last drops off her fingers.

He shakes his head. “I, mm.” He swallows hard. “Had...someone.”

The mother of his child. Val goes completely still.

“Can’t say I wouldn’t try,” he mumbles, and his hands clench on the edge of the engine compartment.

“I’m glad she has you,” Val says, and no words have ever been more true.

“Makes two of us.” He ducks his head, and then looks sidelong to squint at her. “You’ve, mm.” He gestures to his forehead. “Still.”

It’s as much of an absolution as she could hope for.

 

 


End file.
